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Five ways to answer life’s biggest questions

John O’Connell

September 10 2012, 1:01am, The Times

Sebastian Faulks, A Possible LifeRandom House

Sebastian Faulks’s eleventh proper novel is a portmanteau work in five sections spanning several countries and a couple of centuries. The portentous title hints at experiment as well as profundity, but don’t be scared. A Possible Life isn’t Molloy, even if it has its experimental moments and asks Beckettian questions: What does it mean to have a self? How might this self join with other selves and move through time and space to create history? The struggle between art, science and religion to supply answers is as violent and absurd as it has ever been. Faulks’s intuition — it was probably Beckett’s, too — is that literature knows best.

Each section is named after its protagonist. Geoffrey, the first, follows a naive school teacher and…